A Million Windows (9 page)

Somewhere in both the first and the later edition of his book, the American scholar mentioned earlier uses the expression
double-voicing
to denote the technique by which the narrator of a work of fiction is able to seem to report a series of events while
at the same time seeming to report the thoughts and feelings of some or another character involved in the events. The technique has been used by numerous narrators, but the undiscerning reader of this narrative may still be in need of an example.

Nick rubbed his eye. There was a big bump coming up. He would have a black eye, all right. It ached already. That son of a crutting brakeman.

The four sentences and the exclamation above are part of some or another work of fiction by Ernest Hemingway. A person reading the sentences with alertness should hear, as it were, two voices, one voice being that of the narrator and the other being that of the character Nick. In the first sentence, only the voice of the narrator can be heard. In the second, third, and fourth sentences, that same voice is heard again. In those three sentences, however, the voice of the narrator reports not only his own observations but sensations and insights of the character himself, and when these two are reported the language seems not only the narrator's but partly that of the character. The discerning reader might even notice a gradual change in the viewpoint from sentence to sentence. The first sentence reports only what might be seen of the character. Later sentences move more closely, as it were, towards the character's own viewpoint, and the final exclamation seems so much in keeping with the character that it might have been enclosed within quotation marks. By this time, the narrator
who seemed, only moments earlier, to be addressing us in his own voice has seemed to fall silent.

I would estimate that rather more than half the fiction published during my lifetime is written from a point of view hardly different from that of the passage quoted above and seems to be told by a narrator claiming to know all that is known to the chief character but not much more. By this I mean that if the narrator were reporting the visit of the chief character to a certain hotel, he or she (the narrator) would not usually inform the reader that the hotel had been the site, a hundred years before, of the founding of a certain political party or of a notorious murder if the chief character was unaware of such matters. Not only have I read much fiction of the sort quoted but I have myself sometimes written such fiction and not wanted afterwards to repudiate it. This sort of fiction provides its readers with an experience not unlike what I felt when I stood confused among the concentric box hedges and gravel paths. I was not lost or in any sort of danger. Even if I had not been able to plot a path outwards through the hedges, I could have scrambled over them or through them and could have got back to my room whenever I chose. For as long as I limited my thinking, however; for as long as I observed what I supposed were the conventions of gardens and their designers; for as long as I felt bound to walk only on designated pathways and forbidden from breaking through even a miniature hedge, then I seemed truly a captive of the artifice and of whoever had designed it, even though I could look away at any time from the petty labyrinth
and outwards towards the far-reaching countryside or upwards towards this massive building and its numerous windows.

I have not wanted to repudiate any fiction of mine the narrator of which has the viewpoint described above, but I have wanted, for almost as long as I have been a writer of fiction, to secure for myself a vantage-point from which each of the events reported in a work of fiction such as this present work, and each of the personages mentioned in the work, might seem, at one and the same time, a unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or to classify but also a mere detail in an intricate scheme or design. I might have written instead of the previous sentence that I have for long wanted to call into being a fictional narrator by definition more knowledgeable and more trustworthy than a personage such as myself, the narrator of this present work.

I have been sometimes dissatisfied with the sort of narration in which the thoughts and feelings of the chief character alone are reported. (‘Nick rubbed his eye...') I have sometimes felt concerned that such fiction diminishes the importance of the narrator. The undiscerning reader of such fiction might well suppose himself or herself merely to be witnessing one after another event, so to call it, in the life, so to call it, of the chief character in almost the way that the viewer of a film supposes himself or herself to be witnessing actuality, so to call it. And yet, this sort of fiction gives to its reader an experience far richer and more satisfying than is offered by the spurious sort of fiction that seems to lack a narrator.

Was it thirty or forty years ago when I first tried to read the
only work that I have tried to read by a certain author from Latin America who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature? I long ago forgot the title of the book that I once tried to read. I had first learned about the book when I read a most favourable review of it in
The Times Literary Supplement
. I had paid my bookseller of those days a sum that was for me substantial so that she could have a single copy of the book sent to me by sea from England. I began to read the book with much expectation but was puzzled and dissatisfied before I had read twenty pages.

I have confessed already in these pages to being an ignorant and gullible reader. Thirty or forty years ago, I was even more ignorant and more gullible. After I had read the first twenty pages of the acclaimed work of fiction and had got no satisfaction from them, I was inclined to blame myself and my lack of skill as a reader. Even so, I read closely again the pages that had failed to satisfy me and further pages still, looking into the text itself for a possible cause of my dissatisfaction. I suspect that I had not previously studied the narrative technique of any work of fiction. I would have been well aware of the presence of many a narrator while I read but unaware of his or her technique or of its being only one of many that might have been used. In spite of my ignorance, I was quick to recognise that the fiction of the celebrated Latin American lacked any sort of narrative presence. I would have been hesitant thirty or forty years ago to blame or condemn the famous author but I long since decided that the author of a text lacking a narrative presence is guilty of posturing or, more likely, of incompetence.

What I read on the first page of the book mentioned was a monologue, and an undistinguished monologue at that. Someone who might have been male or female and of any age – someone was responsible for an uninterrupted outpouring. No, the author of the text in front of my eyes had written a report intended to persuade me that I was privy to – what were they? – the thoughts, the mutterings, the memories, or the daydreams of an utterly unknown thinker, mutterer, rememberer, or daydreamer. (However ignorant and gullible I might have been at the time, I could never have supposed the monologue, as I call it, to be any sort of purported text, as though the author of the book in front of me was quoting from the writings of one or another of his characters, so to call them. Even the least-skilled of writers could have composed something more readable than the unvarying wordage in front of me.)

After I had read a certain number of densely printed pages, I came to a gap in the text. After the gap came another body of text hardly different from the first, and even the reader that I was at that time began to resent the lack of information provided. Was the second monologue to be attributed to the same young or old, male or female thinker or mutterer or rememberer or daydreamer who had been responsible for the first? Or, was I now reading the presumed thoughts or whatever of quite another personage? Even the reader that I was at the time could see that the rhythms and the grammar of the second monologue differed in no way from those of the first. Perhaps the gap in the text was intended to denote an interval of fictional time.
(The previous sentence happens to be the culmination of a series of sentences illustrating once again the form of narration exemplified by the passage that I quoted earlier from Ernest Hemingway. Quite without meaning to do so, I, as narrator, composed the series in order to point up the situation of my chief character, in this case my younger self. My having done so should demonstrate the usefulness of this mode of narration and even, perhaps, what might be called its naturalness.)

The reader of these pages will hardly need to be told that a third unattributed monologue or, rather, a third written report of an unattributed monologue followed the second. I cannot recall how many such reports I read before I gave up reading the highly praised book, but I recall that I looked ahead in order to satisfy myself that the hundreds of pages yet to be read comprised nothing else but report after report of monologue after monologue from some or another nameless thinker, or mutterer, or rememberer or daydreamer.

At some time when I was trying to read the highly praised book, I learned from the publisher's advertisement on the dust-jacket that the novel, so to call it, was written in a
spiral of time
. Perhaps, being gullible and ignorant, I decided that a great deal had now been explained; that I was at fault for not having recognised the invisible whorled structure that gave coherence and meaning to what I had found incoherent and meaningless. Perhaps I even searched for evidence of time's being arranged spiral-wise in the jumble of text. (I surely understood at the time that a close study of events and places and persons referred to in each
monologue could have told me who was the presumed speaker of each and when, in the time-sequence of the whole work, each speaker could have been presumed to have delivered his or her outpouring. But I was just as surely hindered from doing so by the fact that each of the monologues, as I call them, was made up of the same unrelenting prose. Authors of fiction purporting to come from a medley of voices are seldom skilful enough to compose a distinctive prose for each supposed speaker.) If I did thus search, I could hardly have found anything to justify the publisher's absurd claim. I recall only that I put the book away unread and have never since looked into it or felt any desire to read any other work by the celebrated author.

In an earlier paragraph of this section, I tried to compare my situation among the circular paths in the grounds of this building with the situation of a reader content to know in detail about only the chief character of a work of fiction. Elsewhere in this section, I tried to describe a sort of narration that I could wish to achieve and a sort of narrator that I could wish to become. Am I being too fanciful if I end this section by describing myself as standing again among the paths and the box-hedges but this time being reminded of a bewildering diagram in a book of several hundred pages on the subject of narratology – a diagram of concentric circles and diametrical axes – and regretting that I, a fictional personage myself, have never yet seemed a part of such complexity? Or, should I simply report my pleasant confusion when I look away from the hedges and paths and upwards towards the nearest wing of this building
and the window of the room in which these words are being written at this very time?

I am writing again about a supposed author, as I might call him: someone at a desk in some or another room at no great distance from here. He is struggling, if I know anything about him, to compose a few pages of fiction based on, or relating to, or derived from, or inspired by a few weeks that he has never been able to recall. Those were the weeks during his seventeenth year when he sat beside a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, in a suburban railway train and when they talked together for perhaps ten minutes on every weekday afternoon. If the supposed author, so to call him, believes that a writer of fiction is obliged to explain why his characters, so to call them, behave as they are reported as behaving in his fiction, then he has much to explain about his chief character, a young man, hardly more than a boy, who talked for a few weeks with the young woman mentioned in the previous sentence. He, the supposed author, has to explain, for example, why his chief character had previously travelled regularly for two years in the same railway compartment with the young woman and had glanced often in her direction but had made no attempt to speak to her. Alternatively, if the supposed author feels no obligation to explain what might be called the motives of those who might be called his characters, then his readers, whoever they might be, are free to devise their own explanations. One such reader,
for example, might suppose that the chief character, although he would never have used such terms, had always preferred fictional personages to actual personages. That same reader might suppose further that the chief character, soon after he had first exchanged glances with a certain young female person in a railway compartment, had met up with a certain fictional female personage, so to call her. The reader might further suppose that this personage, on a certain afternoon during her fictional life and when she was still a young woman, hardly more than a girl, had met up with a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy. The lives of the two fictional personages had then seemed to go forward not as the lives of actual persons go forward but as the lives of characters in works of fiction are enabled to go forward, which is to say that the deeds and words and thoughts of the personages seemed not to occur in what is commonly called
time
but in what was called earlier in this work the
narrative dimension
. In that dimension, events, so to call them, that might have occupied a year of actual time, so to call it, are reported in a single paragraph whereas the contents of a few moments might need for their full appraisal a chapter that might detain the reader for an hour and might have occupied the writer for a week. In short, while scant details might be said to have been noted from the years when the two young fictional personages chatted in railway compartments or on outings together, details abounded from their later years. Their intimate conversations were transcribed, as it were. Sentences and whole paragraphs were quoted, as it were, from
the letters that they wrote during their brief times apart. And, given that these two personages were far from being characters in an actual text, their behaviour was explained in minute detail. And the subject-matter, so to call it, of this fiction-in-the-mind, as it might be called, included the courtship of the two personages, their engagement, their marriage, their honeymoon, and year after year of their life together as husband and wife and parents.